disrupting myself, or the jump from Product Marketing to Product Management

Product Manager Day 77: More than Requirements

It’s been a month since we launched a new feature – and last I checked, no one was using it.

I work on an internal tool for the purchasing department, and the feature was supposed to help the teams split purchase orders into delivery orders. So far though, no data in the database = no usage.

What I’ve learnt? You can fulfill all the business requirements for a feature, have buy-in from the requestor, communicate the launch with the users, and still end up with something nobody wants.

I guess that’s all part of the Agile process – you make bets, you test by doing, rather than just, well, testing. I still believe in minimizing the risk of wasted development through user testing and research (which we likely should have done more of in this case) – but you’ll never really know until you launch though.

Of course that doesn’t mean the feature is a failure. The question now is to find out why – and tweak/revamp/kill accordingly.

I jumped from Product Marketing to Product Management at Zalora recently. These posts represent a journal of my learnings and reflections. Feel free to connect on Twitter @wasabigeek.